---
title: Evaluation Workflows
description: Best practices for incorporating prompt evaluation into your team's development lifecycle.
---

Effective prompt evaluation isn't just about running tests; it's about integrating the process into your team's regular development and deployment workflows. Here are some strategies:

## 1. Define Your Quality Standards

- **Identify Key Metrics**: What defines a "good" response for this prompt? (e.g., Accuracy, Helpfulness, Conciseness, Safety, Format Adherence).
- **Set Acceptance Criteria**: Define minimum acceptable scores or pass rates for your key evaluations.
- **Choose Evaluation Types**: Select the right mix of [LLM-as-Judge](/guides/evaluations/llm-as-judges), [Programmatic Rules](/guides/evaluations/programmatic-rules), and [Manual Evaluations](/guides/evaluations/humans-in-the-loop) to cover your criteria.

## 2. Establish Golden Datasets

- Create and maintain a representative [Dataset](/guides/datasets/overview) (a "golden dataset") containing diverse inputs and, where applicable, expected outputs.
- This dataset serves as your benchmark for regression testing.
- Include challenging edge cases and examples representing different user intents.

## 3. Evaluation During Development

- **Playground Testing**: Use the [Playground](/guides/prompt-manager/playground) to get immediate evaluation feedback while iterating on prompts.
- **Draft Evaluations**: Run [experiments](/guides/evaluations/running-evaluations#running-evaluations-on-datasets-run-experiment) on your golden dataset _before_ merging changes from a draft version.
- **Peer Review**: Include evaluation results (especially for failing cases) as part of the review process for prompt changes.

## 4. Continuous Monitoring in Production

- **Live Evaluations**: Enable [live evaluations](/guides/evaluations/running-evaluations#running-evaluations-continuously-live-mode-%2F-ongoing) for critical metrics (e.g., format validation, safety checks, basic relevance) to monitor real-time performance.

## 6. Feedback Loops and Improvement

- **Regular Review Meetings**: Discuss evaluation trends and results as a team.
- **Analyze Failures**: Dig into logs with poor evaluation scores to understand the root causes.
- **Leverage Suggestions**: Use the [Prompt Suggestions](/guides/evaluations/prompt-suggestions) feature to guide improvements.
- **Update Golden Dataset**: Periodically add new challenging examples or successful edge cases from production logs to your golden dataset.
- **Refine Evaluations**: Adjust evaluation criteria or prompts as your understanding of quality evolves.

By embedding these practices, your team can systematically ensure prompt quality, reduce regressions, and continuously improve the reliability and performance of your AI applications.
